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Exploring the strategic and human dimensions of the defense of Outpost Harry.

By June 1953 the Korean War, marked at the outset by extremely fluid advances and retreats up and down the peninsula, had settled into position warfare very near the original pre-war demarcation line between North and South Korea. At this point both sides were fighting to win a peace, to achieve incremental advantages that could be translated into gains at the peace negotiations in Panmunjom. The battle at Outpost Harry devolved into hand-to-hand combat during a period of constant, intense fighting that lasted two days. The author, although seriously wounded that night, refused evacuation and remained on the hill to successfully lead his company in defense of the outpost. It wasn’t romantic; it wasn’t chivalrous; and many died or were badly wounded. Some of the survivors never fully overcame the mental and physical damage they suffered during the nightmare.

With this book, one of those scarred by that experience recounts the events of the battle and his lifelong efforts to deal with the residual horrors. The Korean Conflict may be called "the forgotten war" by some, but not by those who were on the front lines.

A firsthand account of the American Jewish experience on the front lines of the Korean War

During the height of the Korean conflict, 1950–51, Orthodox Jewish chaplain Milton J. Rosen wrote 19 feature-length articles for Der Morgen Zhornal, a Yiddish daily in New York, documenting his wartime experiences as well as those of the servicemen under his care. An American Rabbi in Korea is an English translation of Rosen's important articles prepared by his son and annotated with background about Rosen's military service, a general introduction to the war and conflict on the Korean peninsula, and numerous maps and photographs.

Rosen was among those nearly caught in the Chinese entrapment of American and Allied forces in North Korea in late 1950, and some of his most poignant writing details the trying circumstances that faced both soldiers and civilians during that time. As chaplain, Rosen was able to offer a unique account of the American Jewish experience on the frontlines and in the United States military while also describing the impact of the American presence on Korean citizens and their culture. His interest in Korean attitudes toward Jews is also a significant theme within these articles. The sum is a readable account of war and its turmoil from an astute and compassionate observer.
 

The 7th Infantry Regiment’s motto, “Willing and Able,” speaks volumes about its past. Throughout America’s history the soldiers of this regiment have proven, by their sweat, their sacrifice, and their bloodshed, that they are willing and able to fight America’s wars. They have fought in more battles, in more places, than any other regiment in the United States Army. They boast more Medal of Honor winners than all but one other unit. At practically every crucial moment in America’s wars, the 7th has been there, shaping the future of the country and, by extension, the world.

In this in-depth history of the 7th, acclaimed combat historian John C. McManus takes readers from cold war campaigns through the global war on terror, chronicling the modern era of the regiment’s amazing history. Covering desperate fights for Korean hills, the struggle for control of steamy Vietnamese villages, and the lightning campaign of Desert Storm, the narrative culminates in the 7th’s toils in the Middle East. More than anything, McManus’s chronicle of the 7th portrays these unremarkable, ordinary individuals as the heart and soul of the United States Army. McManus gives a complete account of their struggles, anguish, fears, sacrifices, triumphs, and pride, providing a compelling glimpse not only of these soldiers’ journey through American history, but of the shaping of our nation as a whole.

Based on nearly a decade of research, from archives to battlefield visits to McManus’s personal interviews with countless 7th Infantry soldiers, and illustrated with maps and sixteen pages of photographs, this book is a definitive and moving story of Americans in combat.
 

WINNER OF THE 2023 ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH JR. WRITING AWARD

A historical analysis of the policies and military strategies applied during the Korean War stalemate period.

Korean Showdown: National Policy and Military Strategy in a Limited War, 1951–1952 takes a holistic and integrative approach to strategy, operations, and tactics during the Korean War’s stalemate period and demonstrates how these matters shaped each other and influenced, or were influenced by, political and strategic policy decision-making. Bryan R. Gibby offers an analysis of the major political and military decisions affecting how the war was conducted operationally and diplomatically by examining American, Chinese, North Korean, and South Korean operations in the context of fighting a limited war with limited means, but for objectives that were not always limited in scope or ambition. The foundational political decision was Harry Truman’s voluntary repatriation policy, which extended the war by up to eighteen months. Its military counterpart was the American-led Operation Showdown, the last deliberate military offensive to coerce concessions at the negotiation table. Showdown’s failure (and the Communists’ own equally disappointing military efforts) opened up new avenues for solving the war short of a militarily imposed solution.

Gibby’s research draws on primary sources from American, Korean, and Chinese archives and publications. Many of these sources have not yet been mined in diplomatic and military histories of the Korean War. This innovative book also addresses a significant gap in the study of Korean military operations—the linkage between ground and air pressure campaigns, as well as the many Chinese and American operations conducted to establish negotiation positions. Gibby also explores many political and propagandist developments that assumed great importance in the summer of 1952, such as prisoner of war riots, the bombing of hydroelectric dams, and the South Korean constitutional crisis, which significantly influenced American and Chinese military decision-making.

Ultimately, this volume serves as a cautionary analysis of the limits of force, the necessity to understand an adversary, and the importance of strategic consensus. It also offers an effective case study on an underappreciated period of civil-military tension during the Cold War and on how civilian politicians and military leaders must collaborate to determine a realistic and effective strategy.
 

In Little Helpers, historian John Robert Greene encourages us to rethink the scandals of Harry Truman’s presidency by providing the first political biography of the man who precipitated them—Gen. Harry H. Vaughan. As the former president’s close friend and military aide, Vaughan brought a number of disreputable figures into the White House, in addition to committing plenty of misconduct on his own. Although aware of Vaughan’s misdeeds, Truman remained unwilling to rid his administration of him and his hangers on. Vaughan’s scandals have largely gone overlooked by historians—a tendency that Little Helpers corrects.
 
Greene begins with the story of how Truman and Vaughan met during World War I, then examines Vaughan’s support for Truman for the Senate and later as President. The majority of the book, however, considers the various cronies that surrounded Vaughan and illustrates the significance of his relationship with Truman—and the president’s inability to rein him in.
 
Drawing from primary and archival sources, many never before published, Little Helpers is further distinguished by its use of the correspondence between Vaughan and Truman. Greene also provides a dramatic narrative account of the inner workings of the Truman administration, making the book accessible to the general reader as well as the specialist. 

 

The Korean War, often invoked in American culture as “the forgotten war,” remains ongoing. Though active fighting only occurred between 1950 and 1953, the signing of an armistice resulted in an infamous stalemate and the construction of the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone. Minor Salvage reads early Korean American life writings in order to explore the admittedly partial ways in which those made precarious by war seek to rebuild their lives. The titular phrase “minor salvage,” draws on different valences of the word salvage which, while initially associated with naval recovery efforts, can also be used to describe the rescue of waste material. Spurred by the stories told and retold to him by his parents Soon Ho and Yunpyo, Sohn enacts minor salvage by reading overlooked early Korean American life writings penned by Induk Pahk, Taiwon Koh, Joseph Anthony, and Kim Yong-ik alongside a later generation of life writings authored by Sunny Che and K. Connie Kang. In the context of the Korean War, Sohn argues, life writings take on a crucial political orientation precisely because of the fragility attached to refugees, civilians, children, women, and divided family members. To depict the possibility of life is to acknowledge simultaneously the threat of death, violence, and brutality, and in this regard, such life writings are part of a longer genealogy in which marginalized communities find representational power through the creative process.

Roger Paul Clow, an orphaned refugee of the Korean War, was sent to America as a child in 1953. Seventy years later, his historian daughter grapples with the meaning of her father’s life while grieving his death. 

Orphan/Agent is a personal narrative that doubles as an accessible introduction to key issues in transpacific history and Asian American studies. As the book follows Roger from a childhood in wartime Korea, to student years in the continental US, to a career in Hawai‘i, it reckons with the lasting consequences of war and challenges mythic narratives of the American Dream, the model minority, and American exceptionalism. 

Blending family stories and historical analysis, Orphan/Agent models historical thinking for students. Readers may well be inspired to revisit their own family stories, with new questions, respect for their sources, and love.

Remembering Is Not Enough traces the emergence of a critical consciousness of the Korean War in American literature and culture over the past seventy-five years. A. J. Yumi Lee provides close readings of key texts from the post-Cold War era that remember and represent the “forgotten” Korean War, including Sook Nyul Choi’s Year of Impossible Goodbyes, Toni Morrison’s Home, Marie Myung-ok Lee’s The Evening Hero, and Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters. She argues that rather than simply revisiting a known and settled history, contemporary Korean War literature is actively processing an unresolved conflict that is both past and not past.

Lee shows how literary works have challenged common understandings of the war as an American victory for freedom, from soldiering narratives that address the violence of U.S. imperialism to Korean diasporic novels that depict the surfacing of memory across generations. These examples ask readers to process, analyze, and critique as they remember, and Lee emphasizes that how and why we remember matters as much as what is being recalled.

Reflecting on the Korean War in new and often unexpected ways, Remembering Is Not Enough prompts us to reorient our memories, our storytelling, and our actions toward a more just and peaceful future.

How carrier-based air power helped define victory in the first hot war of the Cold War.

In The Naval Air War in Korea, Richard P. Hallion offers a compelling and authoritative account of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps air campaign during the Korean War, a conflict that marked a pivotal transition in the history of military aviation. Through meticulous research and engaging narrative, Hallion examines how carrier-based air power became a decisive factor in supporting United Nations forces across the Korean Peninsula.

From the desperate defense of the Pusan Perimeter and the dramatic Inchon landing to interdiction strikes, close air support missions, and air superiority operations, naval aviators demonstrated extraordinary adaptability in a rapidly changing battlefield environment. The conflict also witnessed the evolution of aviation technology as propeller-driven aircraft served alongside emerging jet fighters, foreshadowing the future of modern air warfare.

Hallion highlights the courage, innovation, and operational effectiveness of Navy and Marine pilots who flew from aircraft carriers positioned off Korea's coasts, projecting combat power far beyond the reach of ground forces. Beyond recounting key battles and campaigns, he explores the strategic lessons learned from the war and their lasting influence on American naval doctrine and Cold War military planning.

A valuable resource for historians, aviation enthusiasts, and students of military strategy, this volume illuminates the crucial role of naval air power in shaping the outcome and legacy of the Korean War.

One of America’s early attempts at nation building - US military advisors' shaping of the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) from 1946 until 1953.

Gibby describes ROKA’s structure, mission, challenges, and successes, thereby linking the South Korean army and their US advisors to the traditional narrative of this “forgotten war.” The work also demonstrates the difficulties inherent in national reconstruction, focusing on barriers in culture and society, and the effects of rapid decolonization combined with intense nationalism and the appeal of communism to East Asia following the destruction of the Japanese empire. Key conclusions include the importance of individual advisors, the significance of the prewar advisory effort, and the depth of the impact these men had on individual Korean units and in a few cases on the entire South Korean army. 

The success or failure of South Korean government in the decade following the end of World War II hinged on the loyalty, strength, and fighting capability of its army, which in turn relied on its American advisors. Gibby argues that without a proficient ROKA, the 1953 armistice, still in effect today, would not have been possible. He reexamines the Korean conflict from its beginning in 1945—particularly Korean politics, military operations, and armed forces—and demonstrates the crucial role the American military advisory program and personnel played to develop a more competent and reliable Korean army.

Warring Genealogies examines the elaboration of kinships between Chicano/a and Asian American cultural production, such as the 1954 proxy adoption of a Korean boy by Leavenworth prisoners. Joo Ok Kim considers white supremacist expressions of kinship—in prison magazines, memorials, U.S. military songbooks—as well as critiques of such expressions in Chicana/o and Korean diasporic works to conceptualize racialized formations of kinship emerging from the Korean War.

Warring Genealogies unpacks writings by Rolando Hinojosa (Korean Love Songs, The Useless Servants) and Luis Valdez (I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, Zoot Suit) to show the counter-representations of the Korean War and the problematic depiction of the United States as a benevolent savior. Kim also analyzes Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student as a novel that proposes alternative temporalities to dominant Korean War narratives. In addition, she examines Chicano military police procedurals, white supremacist women’s organizations, and the politics of funding Korean War archives.

Kim’s comparative study Asian American and Latinx Studies makes insightful connections about race, politics, and citizenship to critique the Cold War conception of the “national family.”

Highlighting hypocrisy of US Civil Rights oppression while fighting for Korean freedom

The Korean War is commonly known as the “forgotten war” because it supposedly had little impact on American culture in comparison to World War II or the American War in Vietnam. Yet from 1950–1953, the conflict produced vigorous anti-war activism, particularly among Black radical women. Informed by their experiences with racism and misogyny within the US, these women were convinced that peace was not just the absence of military aggression, but that it required the liberation of the most oppressed, including the end of capitalist exploitation of women and People of Color and the return of self-determination to colonized peoples—themes that later anti-war activists would echo and develop. Whether or not the Korean War has ever truly been forgotten, the visionary activism of these women has been largely overlooked.

In Women March for Peace, Denise Lynn examines the lives of seven Black women—Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Charlotta Bass, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Beulah Richardson—and their resistance to domestic and foreign US policies during the height of anticommunist hysteria. While much peace scholarship focuses on the threat of nuclear conflict, Lynn instead explores how these women connected issues of civil rights at home with international military campaigns, highlights the hypocrisy of containment policies that sought to secure the freedom and rights for Koreans when US citizens were still oppressed. Lynn traces their peace advocacy through their personal papers, local and national articles, Progressive Party documents, and global conventions. Women March for Peace recovers the radical activism of these Black women to understand a crucial chapter in the fight against American imperialism and white supremacy.